


Somewhere

by Luthor



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Swan Queen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:32:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthor/pseuds/Luthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere, Emma Swan is staring across at her roommate in disapproval, and wondering how it was she came to find a home worth protecting. She teeters back on heavy feet, allowing a woman – this new woman, from which her home needs protecting – to pass with her bags.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere

**Author's Note:**

> There is no curse. Emma raised Henry. Regina is not mayor. Mary Margaret’s flat is kind of like the TARDIS. You’ll pick the rest up along the way… I hope?

CATALYST

Somewhere, Emma Swan is staring across at her roommate in disapproval, and wondering how it was she to came find a home worth protecting. She teeters back on heavy feet, allowing a woman – this new woman, from which her home needs protecting – to pass with her bags.

“This is Regina,” she says, her roommate, Mary Margaret. “She’s having a mid-life crisis, she’ll be staying with us for a while.” As though it’s nothing out of the ordinary, to invite back strangers – _she’s a stranger to me_ , Emma thinks – to stay in her home.

And, _Well, she did for me_. Emma, again, watching as the woman, Regina, drags her cases through to Mary Margaret’s bedroom.

“ _Existential_ ,” she cries from within the room. “Existential crisis. Don’t you age me, Mary, I know what you did the summer of ’89.”

The door closes loudly, and Emma suppresses the urge to call after her to hold the quiet, to keep the order of Mary Margaret’s little flat just as she and Henry had had to do. She turns to Mary Margaret, but Mary Margaret turns away. She allows the slamming of doors to go unnoticed. It will become a habit, where Regina is concerned.

Emma stares after her and feels the essence of change seeping in through the still open door with the wind. She closes it, and steps back into the warm.

The process, then, has begun.

 

# # # #

 

It is breakfast. It has been two weeks since Regina arrived. Emma has counted the days, and presents them to Mary Margaret as proof; evidence of something she has yet to fully uncover. It will hit her, later, the realisation.

By then, as every good cliché goes, it will be too late.

For breakfast, Emma has a cheese bagel. Mary Margaret chews a banana while nursing a decaf coffee just beneath her chin. Henry’s shoulders hunch over his bowl of cereal as though to protect it, elbows out, milk on his chin.

Regina slides a hand of red-painted nails into her pocket and produces a cigarette.

“You can’t light that in here.”

She lifts her eyes to Emma, and they are hooded. Not with make-up, but lack of sleep. And crying.

She moves her eyes to Mary Margaret.

Mary Margaret looks to Henry.

Henry pulls the sleeve of his school jumper up over his knuckles and wipes away the milk from his chin.

“If you want that, go outside with it,” Emma says, and there’s cheese spread on her finger, but she won’t lick it clean yet.

“I’ll open a window.” Her lips twitch.

“We don’t smoke inside.”

_We don’t smoke, full stop_.

Regina purses her lips. She puts the cigarette away.

 

# # # #

 

Regina comes in drunk that night. It is a weeknight, and Emma stares long and hard at Mary Margaret’s face as she helps Regina in through the door.

“I’ll take her to bed,” Mary Margaret says, and she’s pretending that she can’t feel Emma’s gaze on her, even when Regina swings into her body to stare over one shoulder, waving a hand.

“I only had a few,” Regina says. She grips onto the door frame before Mary Margaret can get her inside the bedroom, and uses her body to halt further progress.

“What is it? Come to bed.”

“No, I—” She stares around the living area, her eyes bouncing around Emma as though not seeing her. “I—”

“What?” Mary Margaret tries again. She gets one arm around Regina and takes her wrist in the other, gently prying her fingers away from the door frame. “Come on, get in bed. It’s okay.”

“Will you stay?”

“Yes, I’ll stay.”

“Hold me.”

“I’m right here, just a moment.”

“Help me with the zipper?”

“I’ve got it, one moment.”

And then the door closes, and Emma can no longer hear them. Regina appears the next morning wearing Mary Margaret’s pyjamas for breakfast. Emma does not ask questions.

 

# # # #

 

COMBUSTION

 Somewhere, Regina Mills is forgetting her reasoning for coming to Storybrooke. She presses her lips to Emma’s and closes her eyes.

Emma is the first to pull away.

“Woah, wait. No. No, what about Mary Margaret?”

“What about Mary Margaret?” Regina repeats, and is already on her way in for another kiss when Emma brings her hands up to her shoulders and physically stops her. “ _What_?”

“You two are…”

“What?”

“A _thing_.” And it’s disgusting, when she says it, and it tastes disgusting on her lips.

Regina laughs. “Whatever gave you that impression?”

“You share a toothbrush.”

“That means nothing.”

“You share a bed.”

Firmly: “That means nothing.”

“Last night, I heard you telling her to rub harder and turn up the Lionel Richie.”

 “Fair point.” Regina purses her lips. “But you’re mistaken. Mary Margaret and I—Mary Margaret’s straight.”

“So, you’ve _never_?”

“Well. There was that one time in ’89.” She sees the look on Emma’s face, and her own changes to accommodate it. “No – not since then.”

Emma looks away. Her hands leave Regina’s shoulders, and Regina feels the sudden need to fix, or to heal, just as she has done herself these past few months.

“I like the company.” It’s a poor explanation, but she turns anyway, slides her fingers into her pockets and revels in the clear, sharp sound of her heels hitting the pavement. “Without the sex – or the relationship.”

“Is that what you want?”

She meets Emma’s eyes. A gust of wind blows her hair across her face, and she reaches up to clear it.

“Not forever.”

 

# # # #

 

They’re arguing, again, but Emma says they aren’t, when Henry passes through, indifferent, making a sport of them and the ‘us’ they’ve created.

When he’s gone, again, and closed his bedroom door along with him, Regina says, “Your child hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you, he just doesn’t trust you.”

“It’s the same thing,” dismissively.

“It’s really not.”

Regina sighs. She’s pressed her hands to her face, as though it might steal her a moment of time – just a second – to lock herself away in and think. But Emma comes around her, and when she’s prying her fingers away from her eyes, Regina knows that the clock on the mantelpiece has changed its face, without having to look.

“Do you want it to stop?” Emma asks, and Regina thinks she means the clock, for just a second.

“No.”

“I’d rather you tell me now, than wake up one morning and deci—”

“ _No_.” She brings her hands to Emma’s cheeks, hiding the freckles and the faint blush. “I do want this.”

_It’s just hard_.

Emma blinks slowly, and Regina watches the moment her pupils dilate upon reopening, darkness swarming the hazel.

_But it’s worth it_.

She drops her hands, and takes up Emma’s, squeezing their fingers together.

“I… I have a kid,” Emma says, but her tone is weak, the argument already lost. “This isn’t just about me.”

“I can do commitment,” Regina says. She runs her thumbs along Emma’s knuckles, lingering in the soft spaces between each rise of bone. “And responsibility.”

“Oh, yeah?” It’s meek, but it’s a smile.

“I was captain of the softball team three years running, in high school. You don’t know order until you have eight hormonal teenagers arriving early to practise in wind, rain and hail.”

Emma grins, but sobers. “I’m serious.”

“As am I.” Regina dips her head, brushes her nose against the vacant space – empty, available – in front of Emma’s face. “About you.”

“That’s cheesy.”

“I can do that, too.”

“Oh, _yeah_?”

“Stop doubting me, and kiss me,” and it’s playful, and she’s smiling, and it’s easy to forget, for now, that they have so much further to go, when they’ve already come so far.

But Emma’s smiling, too, and she does as she’s told, and leans in, and the kiss is warm and wet and breathless.

And, from the doorway, just passing through, Mary Margaret peers in with a smile of her own. Because all of that hard work, all her efforts for change will pay off in the end, she is certain. 


End file.
